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PATRICK Z. MCGAVIN

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Review: Step Up Revolution

Abstractly beautiful
The ne plus ultra of “guilty pleasures,” the Step Up movies are willfully naive, awkward, and irresistible.

By: PATRICK Z. MCGAVIN | July 26, 2012

Review: Farewell, My Queen

Adapted from Chantal Thomas’s novel
The gifted French director Benoît Jacquot specializes in movies about the emotions of young women.

By: PATRICK Z. MCGAVIN | July 24, 2012

Maïwenn's third feature film
The third feature by French actress and filmmaker Maïwenn, about the inner-workings of Paris's Child Protection Unit (CPU), is certainly kinetic, though also mannered and hyperbolic.

By: PATRICK Z. MCGAVIN | May 24, 2012

Review: Goodbye First Love

Self-destructive passion
The autobiographical third feature from French director Mia Hansen-Løve limns the ecstasy and tumult of youthful, sometimes self-destructive passion.

By: PATRICK Z. MCGAVIN | May 08, 2012

Review: In Darkness

Agnieszka Holland's Oscar-nominated story
Polish director Agnieszka Holland's Oscar-nominated story about a wastrel named Leopold Socha (Robert Wieckiewicz), who hid the Jews of Lvov from the Nazis by concealing them in the sewers, has an anguished and feral intensity.

By: PATRICK Z. McGAVIN | March 01, 2012

Review: Miss Bala

Gerardo Naranjo's superb new feature
Gerardo Naranjo's superb new feature, Miss Bala , brilliantly draws on the conflicted personality of a young beauty pageant contestant as a tragically stark emblem of Mexico's all-enveloping drug wars.

By: PATRICK Z. MCGAVIN | January 24, 2012

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